Less Downtime And Problems

A while ago I complained about problems with NIS under Mac OS X. The amount of comments I received on that posting suggests that a lot of people had similiar experiences.

Encouraged by Iain Patterson’s excellent post about using LDAP under Mac OS X and with a bit of help from my fellow worker Robert Brown I managed to get LDAP working. I’m using OpenLDAP on my NetBSD server to provided this service.

The LDAP directory is kept up to date by a self written Perl script. It automatically replicates the contents of the NIS maps passwd.byname, group.byname and mounts.byname into the LDAP database. As the script is automatically run by the makefile on the NIS master the LDAP server will pick up all changes immediately.

I’m using LDAP instead of NIS on my Mac for several weeks now. The change-over fixed all the problems I previously encountered:

I can always login using my LDAP account after the machine finished booting up.